Drupal 8 is based on Symfony framework. What are the key pieces to learn for Drupal developers?

1. DRUPAL 8 –
WHAT TO LEARN FROM SYMFONY?
Joonas Iivonen
Senior Developer

2. Symfony2 in D8
 Drupal 8 will use Symfony components…
What does that mean?
 Go and check D8’s core/vendor/symfony
and core/vendor/symfony-cmf
 What of that do we need to learn in order to
start developing modules for Drupal 8?

3. OO, Namespaces,…
 Ok, not really Symfony
 Drupal 8 is much more Object-Oriented
and uses Namespace than before
 Most of configuration is in YAML files

4. Routing
 No more paths in hook_menu().
 Routing matches Request to a Response
Imagesource:https://drupal.org/developing/api/8/routing

5. Routing
 Routing file
modules/example/example.routing.yml
 Or routing method returning an array of
SymfonyComponentRoutingRoute objects
or a
SymfonyComponentRoutingRouteCollection
object
 Also possible to alter routes by extending
DrupalCoreRoutingRouteSubscriberBase

6. Services
 Services are decoupled reusable
functionalities like database or emailer
 Modules can define services in
modules/example/example.services.yml file
 Services are provided to objects using
dependency injection

7. Twig
 Ok, not really Symfony again
 Twig is the new templating engine
 Much nicer than the old PHP templates

8. PHPUnit
 Yes. This is not Symfony either
 Simpletest is still used for web tests and
DrupalUnitTests that need Drupal
 Real unit testing uses PHPUnit

9. And there is more
 Symfony
 EventDispatcher
 ClassLoader
 Validator
 Translation
 Process
 Serializer
 Composer
 Doctrine / Annotations
 Guzzle, HTTP client
 Assetic
 EasyRDF
 PSR-3 logging
 Zend / Feed
+ all the new or changed Drupal concepts like
Plugins, Entity API, Fields, Forms…

10. Drupal 8 is coming.